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Change up your usual class routine and give BreakoutEDU a try. Your students will beg you for more. Really. Here’s how it works: There is a box. There are some locks. There’s some other stuff, too. You give your students a scenario, and their job is to work together to find a way to crack the combos on the locks to get into the box. Depending on the scenario you choose, students are required to use their content knowledge to solve clues. They also need to problem solve, collaborate, think critically — all of those great 21st Century / Transfer Skills. A few teachers / staff members already have implemented BreakoutEDU with success, including social studies teachers Tiffany Nix and Nick Aguina, school psychologist Eric Born, and CTE teacher Marcia Zboril. I used BreakoutEDU for an ILC Do Something Cool last semester, and the students left the room asking, “When can we do that again?” Here is what Tiffany had to say about her experience using BreakoutEDU along with co-teacher Nick: Congratulations to Enrique Gomez and Kaylee Riffer, who joined the ILC Reader Hall of Fame for reading all twenty books on the Abraham Lincoln Book Award list for 2017. This is Enrique's second year in a row of accomplishing this challenge. Each earned a $10 Amazon gift card. They also were invited to a pizza party along with the several other students who read at least four books from the list to qualify to vote for their favorite. Any student who read at least four books was entered into a raffle for a Kindle Fire. Our two winners were Ailyn Daruwala and Kaylee Riffer.
Take a moment to think back to your childhood. What is your earliest memory of reading or being read to by someone? That moment in time was when you started to develop language skills that would serve as the foundation for your learning? Early literacy is so important for developing those critical early reading skills. In support of early literacy community efforts, Donna Corcoran, Barb Mason, Nicki Sutherland, Marcia Zboril, and I have collaborated with the Lake County Health Department’s Reach Out and Read program. Since 2008, we have conducted book drives and have donated 12,173 new or gently used books for Lake County children ages 6 months to 5 years old! Impressive work. And we’re not done yet! Donna Corcoran and I recently attended the Midwest Educational Technology Committee conference in St. Charles, Missouri, and wanted to share some takeaways. Feel free to follow-up with us if you have questions or ideas. Also, visit this Google folder, where we copied some of the presentations from the sessions we attended. You can view most of the presentations for all of the sessions on the METC website.
Recently, I happened upon the Heineonline blog post in which the company made a rare corporate decision. Rather than charge a subscription fee for their newest collection, Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture & Law, William S. Hein & Co., Inc. has chosen to provide free access to everyone in an effort to “help educate their communities and create an environment for open and positive dialogue.”
As February is Black History Month, Barb and I thought it was the perfect time to share this resource with our school community. Barb and I are excited to share with you our trial for a product that makes locating credible sources for research projects easier for students. We appreciate any feedback you have. The product, EBSCO Discovery Service, allows students to search for sources from our building catalogs and most of our databases using a single search bar. Check it out (see below for login information).
Aahhh, it’s a new year with a promise for a new you. If you’re like me, you enter each year with plans to make changes in your life—maybe you want to lose weight or to spend more time with family and friends.
This year, I’m adding a new resolution to my bucket list. I’m going to challenge myself to read a wider variety of books this year and I challenge you to do the same! Be skeptical consumers of information. That’s the message we need to get across to our students, especially in light of fake news reports across the web and social media, as well as from the mouths of our politicians. Even high-profile media outlets such as Facebook and the Washington Post recently have been accused of bamboozling the public with untruths. Who can we trust these days? Ourselves. |
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